A Rose in Winter

A Rose in Winter is a historical romance by the American writer Kathleen E. Woodiwiss, published in 1982 by Avon Books.

Erienne Fleming is the daughter of a man who has gambled away the family's money and who intends to settle his debts by marrying her to whoever will pay for her. Her brother's injury in a duel has left the household without any other way of recovering, and the man her father chooses is not the one she would have picked. Woodiwiss wrote long novels in which the marriage is settled early and the rest of the book is about what the two people make of it, and this one has the arrangement, the household and the surrounding country as its furniture. The period detail is that of Regency and early nineteenth-century England, and the book appeared after her first novel had established the commercial market for the historical romances that followed.

Woodiwiss had published The Flame and the Flower ten years earlier, and by this point in her career the long historical romance was a standard form in American paperback publishing.